Research

Farrell Ackerman, Professor
Department of Linguistics | fackerman@ucsd.edu | website
Lexicalist, unification-based approach to the morphology/syntax interface; language acquisition and the basic issue of how children acquire predicates; morphosyntax of prenominal relative clauses in the languages of Eurasia.
Natacha Akshoomoff, Associate Adjunct Professor
Department of Psychiatry | nakshoomoff@ucsd.edu | website
Diagnostic and assessment practices for children with autism in community and school settings, social and communication development in children with an early diagnosis of autism, and the neuropsychological development of children at risk for autism. Multidisciplinary study of neuropsychological development in children with cerebral palsy.
Mark Appelbaum, Professor
Department of Psychology | mappelbaum@ucsd.edu | website
Application of quantitative and data analytic methods to a wide variety of problems in psychology and the behavioral sciences; development of quantitative methods for the study of small samples, for dealing with problems of variability, for understanding growth and change, and for the integration of biological (e.g. imaging and genetric) and behavioral data. Website
Ursula Bellugi, Adjunct Professor
Department of Psychology | ubellugi@ucsd.edu | website
Study of the biological foundations of language and cognition; examination of languages in different modalities: comparison of structure, acquisition and processing of spoken and signed languages; neural basis of language and spatial cognition through experimental paradigms with normal speakers and signers and individuals with left- or right-focal lesions of the brain; neural basis of symbolic, linguistic and motor functions; dissociations of language, spatial cognition, and brain organization in selected populations with neurodevelopmental disorders.
Sandra A. Brown, Professor
Department of Psychology | s3brown@ucsd.edu | website
Alcohol and drug abuse across the life span; models of clinical course for substance abuse, psychiatric comorbidity and psychosocial factors influencing transitions out of alcohol and drug problems; role of reinforcement expectancies in the etiology and progression of substance abuse, stress, coping and family factors in the recovery from substance abuse, long-term impact of abuse of multiple substances, and generational differences in substance abuse and treatment outcomes.
Leslie Carver, Associate Professor
Department of Psychology | ljcarver@ucsd.edu | website
The brain basis of cognitive and social developmental change in the transition from infancy to the early toddler years. Changes in the infant brain that allow long-term memory to develop. In addition to developments in cognition, infants at the end of the first year of life form long-lasting relationships with caregivers, and begin to use caregivers as a source of information about how to behave. For example, in the last half of the first year of life, infants begin to look to their parents’ facial expressions to understand how to interpret unusual situations that they encounter. Dr. Carver conducts research on changes in the brain that are associated with such changes in social behavior.
Aaron Cicourel, Professor Emeritus
Department of Cognitive Science | acicourel@ucsd.edu |website
Michael Cole, Professor
Department of Communication | mcole@ucsd.edu | website
  Elaboration of a mediational theory of mind; crosscultural research on cognitive development, especially as it relates to the role of literacy and schooling; individual and organizational change within educational activities specially designed for after school hours.
Eric Courchesne, Professor
Department of Neurosciences | ecourchesne@ucsd.edu | website
Attentional processing at the cellular, neurosystems, and behavioral levels. Research focused on the neurobiology of autism.
Sarah Creel, Assistant Professor
Department of Cognitive Science | screel@ucsd.edu | website
Methodologies to explore how children and adults learn and process complex acoustic information, especially words, and also other types of temporally-patterned stimuli such as music.
Gedeon Deak, Associate Professor
Department of Cognitive Science | gdeak@ucsd.edu | website
Categorizations and generalization in children, cognitive flexibility and its development in children, flexible cognition and human language, embodied learning models of social development, infant-parent communication and joint attention, logical skill and metacognition in children, and word learning in children.
Karen Dobkins, Professor
Department of Psychology | kdobkins@ucsd.edu | website
Development of visual and auditory perception in typically developing infants/children as well as infants/children with, or at risk for, autism spectrum disorders; visual learning; effects of altered sensory experience early in life.
Jeff Elman, Professor
Department of Cognitive Science | jelman@ucsd.edu | website
Language processing, parallel distributed processing, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics.

Alison Wishard Guerra , Assistant Professor

Education Studies | awishard@ucsd.edu | website
Gail Heyman, Professor
Department of Psychology | gheyman@ucsd.edu | website
Dr. Heyman is a developmental psychologist who studies social and cognitive development, with a focus on children's reasoning about people. One primary line of research, which is being conducted both in the U.S. and in China, focuses on how children present information to others, and how they evaluate information that others present. She is also interested in beliefs related to achievement motivation, the relation between language and person perception, and flexibility in children's thinking.
Paula Levin, Lecturer SOE
Education Studies | plevin@ucsd.edu | website
Education and culture, family and childhood; Polynesia, Oceania.
David Liu, Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology | dal027@ucsd.edu | website
Primary research aim is to understand the development of social concepts and how one reasons about causes of people's actions. Research addresses fundamental questions about how the human mind develops and has implications for understanding developmental disorders that involve social and communicative deficits, such as autism.
Jean Mandler, Professor Emeritus
Department of Cognitive Science | jmandler@ucsd.edu | website
One of the best ways to understand the complexities of mental processes is to find their origins in infancy and trace them as they develop over time. My goal is to understand the foundations of mind, a project informally known as "how to build a baby".
Hugh (Bud) Mehan, Professor
Department of Sociology | bmehan@ucsd.edu | website
Social organization of schooling and the construction of identities such as the "competent student," the "learning disabled student," the mentally ill patient" and the "genius."
Jim Moore, Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology | jjmoore@ucsd.edu | website
Chimpanzee ecology in western Tanzania is geared towards increasing our understanding of Plio-Pleistocene hominids (and chimpanzee socioecology); use of comparative behavioral data on temperament in nonhuman primates to clarify proximate mechanisms involved with the evolution of social systems.
Carol Padden, Professor
Department of Communication | cpadden@ucsd.edu | website
The evolution of American Sign Language and how it compares to other areas outside North America and Europe including sentence structure and how narratives are told through the body and hands.
Stephen Potts, Lecturer
Department of Literature | swpotts@ucsd.edu | website
Clarissa Reese, Lecturer
Human Development Program | cjreese@ucsd.edu | website
Laura Schreibman, Professor
Department of Psychology | lschreibman@ucsd.edu | website
UCSD Autism Research Program involved in the experimental analysis and treatment of autism.
Nicholas Spitzer, Professor
Department of Biology | nspitzer@ucsd.edu | website
Understanding the roles of electrical activity in assembly of the nervous system, by analyzing the effects of calcium transients on neuronal differentiation and determining the molecular mechanisms by which they exert these effects.
Joan Stiles, Professor
Department of Cognitive Science | jstiles@ucsd.edu | website
Relations between early cognitive and brain development; early brain plasticity and processes that underlie developmental change in the neural system; development of spatial cognitive abilities including face and pattern processing, spatial attention, and motion and location processing; effects of perinatal stroke on the development of spatial cognitive functioning; functional MRI to map patterns of brain activation associated with performance on spatial tasks in both children and adults; developmental change in neuroanatomy and its associations with changes in behavior.
Olga Vasquez, Associate Professor
Department of Communication | ovasquez@ucsd.edu | website
The intersection of literacy, language, and culture in intercultural settings; bilingual education, culturally responsive curriculum, and access to educational resources by underrepresented groups; sustainable innovative educational activities that provide a range of literacy activities through computer and telecommunication technology.